Do we seriously need to know how to code to create a landing page template?

[Leticia_DoPrado]

I've used 4 different marketing automation tools and I've been new to Marketo over the past few months and I don't understand why there isn't a drag and drop editor for landing page templates and email templates. I feel extremely frustrated because although I know some very basic coding, it's not nearly enough to do some basic things like move modules around or create a very simple landing page that just has a text box, a title, a form and a footer.

Also, I don't understand why there are two options to create a landing page template: free-form or guided. Both of them take you to the template code editor.

Am I just not finding how to build these templates in an easier way? Or is this really how Marketo rolls (you need to 1) be a coder or 2) hire a coder or 3) pay a third party?

[John_Stalnaker]

Hi Greg,

I agree with respect to Marketo. I had my first campaign with Act-On out the door three days after signing the contract with no training or professional assistance. It was my first experience with a marketing automation platform, circa 2011. HubSpot took a little longer, mostly because this time I had existing programs to replace and more data to migrate, plus we were using their web platform. All three are high end platforms. Therefore, with all due respect, it is hard to say "period."

I also think that the training most marketers receive isn't going to approach anything near the level of technical knowledge required to keep your platform up to date with evolving workflows and branding updates. Therefore, if you aren't able to code well yourself you'll find yourself hiring professionals again to update your templates, etc., to the OP's original point.

Best,

- John

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi John,

I would not call Act-On nor Hubspot high-end MAP solutions. I never tried Circa, so I would not tell about it. Act-On and HubSpot are excellent solutions, do not take me wrong, and are furthermore quite easy to start with, easier than Marketo, for sure. But their functional scope and capability to adapt to complex needs or sophisticated organizations lays far beyond what you can do with Marketo or Eloqua. With the functional breath of the later solutions comes a complexity that is not easy to apprehend alone. I had to go through the journey or learning Marketo in 2010, when Marketo had absolutely no presence whatsoever in Europe. So I was totally on my own, with the doc only and no much more (Marketo University and the community were a dream at that time ) and I do know what efforts it takes to do it (and I am a fast learner, with an engineering backgound and 20+ years of marketing experience). Hence my recommendation to get some real help. The time saved on the learning curve is really worth the money.

-Greg

[Sally_Duda]

Agree with Grégoire. The dirty little secret about those drag and drop template editors from competitors is that they aren't fully responsive or look great across clients and devices.

[Ajay_Parikh1]

I used Pardot in the past and found their email and landing page layout creators to be far superior to those found in Marketo. You shouldn't have to have developers code templates in order to allow Marketers to create emails and landing pages that are brand compliant. Every situation is a little different and the ability to make layout modifications is key.

Now that Marketo will be part of the Adobe family shortly, I am hoping that they will be able to bring in more user-friendly drag and drop layout creation features for both landing pages and emails.

[Leticia_DoPrado]

Yesss Ajay!! Exactly what I'm thinking.

[Bonnie_Jeffers2]

Hi Leticia,

While this does not address everything in your post, there is a collection of guided landing page templates you can download and play with. We've been able to tweak these with some trial and error, but that also included help from our web developer. I hope this is useful for you.

Guided Landing Page Templates - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation

[Arvin_Poole]

We're experiencing the same in our company and have tried using different templates without hiring a developer. We have coded some of our landing pages to get us by but have come to realization that it has been difficult to scale across our digital marketing landscape.

We have recently signed up to Unbounce free 30 day trial and realized that this is how landing pages editors should work. It would be nice if Marketo could make their landing page editors a bit more user friendly and update the old templates. They are very 90s.

[Leticia_DoPrado]

Arvin, I've also used Unbounce and I agree that that's how landing pages should work!!!

[Anonymous]

Hi Arvin -

Were you alive and working in the 90's???  Because saying that Marketo landing pages are "very 90's" is absolutely ridiculous if you actually saw what a web page (there wasn't even a concept of a "landing page") looked like in the 90's.  Or maybe - that was your point.  🙂

[Arvin_Poole]

Good morning Stephanie.

Yes, I was very much around in the 90's designing IBM systems during this time. Thanks for the compliment 🙂 My comment was not a shot at Marketo as a company, nor at their powerful enterprise level software as a solution - I am particularly referring to the landing page editor. I have worked with many of the enterprise marketing platforms such Marketo, Eloqua, Silverpop, Pardot, as well as many of the small to mid business editors such as Hubspot, Thrive Themes, Unbounce, Click Funnels, etc) platform since 2012 and this is not a new topic to the Marketo product team nor community. A 90s website was a reference to the aesthetics "look-and-feel" of the templates provided compared to competitors. Hopefully with the acquisition from Adobe, this will become a topic of higher priority.

[John_Stalnaker]

I was!

I think Arvin was referring to the editor, and while I'm sure he was using hyperbole he's not too far off. FrontPage was released in 1995 and Dreamweaver came out in 1998 (and no, I don't consider FrontPage 'high end' ). Marketo's landing page editor is a non-starter for me. There are better ways to achieve the same better results. Doing away with Marketo Landing Pages has been one of the better operational steps we've taken, thanks to Sanford's method for embedding Marketo forms in your own website pages. Is there a downside to it? You get to work in your own CMS and publish pages that look just like your website because they are your website.

I was teaching a professional development course in designing and building web pages at our local university in the late '90s and we were definitely talking about landing pages then, just probably not in quite the same context as you think of them today. Jakob Nielsen had three books out in the 90s, including "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity", and Amazon was launched in 1995. And Pearl Jam!

[Leticia_DoPrado]

Hi John,

thanks for replying. using your own website pages is a seriously valid alternative!!

[Jay_Jiang]

Having used Unbounce, and not being a fan, there are draw backs to using WYSIWYG editors, primarily being that your HTML code is filled it a lot of "bloatcode", trying to make the page presentable and responsive. As a purist, I prefer being given a blank canvas and coding a page from scratch and leaving out the "bloatcode".

Marketo's landing page editor isn't a great UX, but that may be a symptom of letting people write landing page templates from scratch.

[Adam_Pereyra]

Leticia,

Thank you for bringing this point up, I completely agree with you. It is pretty confusing and difficult to create landing pages in Marketo without some coding experience. Same applies to the emails, in my opinion. For that reason, we don't really use Marketo landing pages very often at my company.

In terms of emails, we found that using BeeFree.io worked great for us. It does not solve for your landing page issues, but I am sure there is a simple drag and drop editor out there if the instructions linked above in the other comments do not work for you.

For everyone that posted links to the Marketo Free-Form instructions, thank you!! I am going to take a look at those myself and see if I can create some decent looking pages for my company. I have some HTML coding experience, but not enough to really create a page on my own. Also, I am very rusty as it's been a while since I got my hands dirty with HTML.

[Leticia_DoPrado]

I'm glad I'm not alone in my frustration with this Adam!

[Nicholas_Manojl]

We do have a drag and drop landing page functionality: Create a Free-Form Landing Page - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation

[Leticia_DoPrado]

Thanks, I'll check it out!!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Laeticia,

There might be some confusions here because the term "email template" does not mean the same thing in all MAP products.

In Marketo, unlike other products, an email template does not contain real text nor real images, only place holders and all the graphical contexte (fonts and font size, colors, etc...). Creating those requires coding.

Using these, you can create emails with content in template programs. For instance a template event. this can be done in the WYSIWYG editor. Then you can clone template programs for actual scenarios (for instance an actual event) and edit the assets of this event in a WYSIWYG editor. The same applies to Landing pages. This 3 step mechanism makes in fact Marketo superior to all other products on the Market, because when you clone the program, you not only clone all the assets and workflows it contains but also all the links between these asset. This is a huge time saver.

-Greg

[Leticia_DoPrado]

Thank you for replying! I understand and really appreciate how programs work and the fact that you can clone them and it brings along all the program-related assets with it. I understand the terminology confusion, I was referring to email templates and landing page templates.

Thank you,

-Leticia

[Roxann_McGlump1]

Hi Letitia,

One of our Support Engineers wrote some nice documentation on guided templates that might help you feel more at home with them.

Getting Started With Guided Landing Pages:

Editing Marketo Guided Landing Page Templates, Pt. 1 - Elements:

Editing Marketo Guided Landing Page Templates, Pt. 2 - Variables:

[Leticia_DoPrado]

Thank you! I'll look into it.

-Leticia